Cloud Waltzer

by Tory Cates

  “Why are you hiding from me?” he demanded.

  “I’m not hiding. I’m just . . .” She groped for a word that would explain but not expose. “. . . more comfortable here.” Her voice withered away, ending on a small plaintive note.

  Archer heard it and it melted his frosty anger. The bed rocked as he sat down beside her. “Meredith.” His gentle voice made her think of how kind he’d been to her the day of her first balloon ride. “Doesn’t the sight of my body give you any pleasure at all?” A stripe of moonlight illuminated his eyes. They were concerned, perplexed, and searching. Meredith again felt the titanic pull of her attraction to this man, an attraction that was both supremely physical and something far beyond it. It was that something beyond that drew the truth from her.

  “Yes, of course it does. It gives me immense pleasure.”

  “Then why are you denying me the same satisfaction?”

  Meredith was stung by his question. “If I had a body comparable to yours, I wouldn’t hesitate to parade it about either.”

  “Meredith, don’t be facetious. I already know the splendors of your body. I know them with my hands. Now I want to know them with my eyes.”

  The bed rocked beneath Meredith as Archer sat down beside her. “Your modesty is delightful but unnecessary.” He began to tug lightly, playfully at the sheet that Meredith was gripping with a neurotic tightness just under her chin. The feel of the material slipping from her hands caused the panic seething within her to break into a full, rolling boil.

  “No,” she shouted. Archer instantly let the sheet fall. The rampaging emotions she had been struggling to keep under control for the last twenty-four hours now threatened to break loose. Meredith quaked with the effort of keeping them restrained. She turned her back to Archer, humiliated beyond words. She bit at her lip, trying to turn back the torrent of tears that threatened to fall.

  Archer slid under the covers beside her and laid a gentling hand on her shoulder. “Forgive me, Meredith,” he whispered in a voice that again reminded Meredith of his kindness to her on the day of her first balloon flight. It was his tenderness that began to unravel the bonds of her control. Archer felt the tremors start beneath his hand. He pulled Meredith to him, carefully keeping the sheet in place, and rocked her until the sobs started.

  “That’s it, sweetheart,” he crooned, “let it out. I shouldn’t have pushed you. It wasn’t fair.” He kissed the tears that streamed over her cheeks and held her even more closely against his chest.

  Archer had held other women while they’d cried. Had dried the tears that he’d sometimes caused, but never before had he heard such quiet anguish and plummeting despair in their sobs. He bitterly regretted having triggered them, yet knew that, whatever lay behind them, he would, one day, have to uncover their cause.

  Damning himself for the inadequacy of his will, for whatever spell this perplexing woman he held in his arms had cast over him, Archer felt the prickling in his groin that presaged the ineluctable return of desire. No, he shouted mentally at his traitorous body. But there was nothing he could do to stem the onrushing tide already swamping him. It only rose higher with each breath he took, each inhalation fragrant with her smell. With even her slightest movement, he became more agonizingly aware of her whisper-soft skin and the torturously curving body. Though he might never know its visual delights, his hands burned now to plunder the tactile bounty they held. This is impossible, he cursed himself. With a deep sigh of regret, Archer untangled himself and sat up.

  “Where are you going?”

  He heard the note of panic in Meredith’s question and was even more confused than ever. “I assumed you wanted to be alone.” There was an edge of hardness in his reply that he hadn’t intended, but had to admit did reflect at least a portion of his reaction.

  “No, Archer, don’t leave me. Not yet.”

  Not yet? The words echoed in his mind, leaving behind a trail of questions. Questions that were obliterated by the touch of her hand settling on the back he had turned to her. It kneaded insistent patterns against the resisting muscles. Patterns that no force on earth could make him ignore. No matter how wrong or ill-timed or even dangerous his response might be, it was there. There as it had never been with any other woman. It was in his blood, the blood that even as he willed it back to its source, rushed with a blind will to his groin.

  “Archer? Don’t be angry with me.”

  “Angry? I may be mystified, confused, and frustrated, Meredith, but I’m not angry.” Her hand slid around from his back to the flat slope of his stomach. It teased the springy curls that flared out beneath his navel. Then went lower. A sharp intake of breath met her touch. At the same time she said it with that bold gesture, Meredith whispered, “Love me, Archer.” Archer groaned as the flimsy shreds of his self-control tore loose.

  Though Archer had dreamed throughout the interminable day he’d just lived through of teasing each garment from the porcelain body next to him, he was denied the pleasure as Meredith herself hastily dispatched her clothing, shoving it out from beneath the covers onto the floor. His regret at the denied pleasure was quickly overpowered, however, as her naked length pressed against his in the materialization of something far more maddening than any dream.

  Meredith met the frenzied heat of his desire with her own. The chaos of her emotions was refined into pure, undiluted passion. Neither one could delay their need a moment longer. “Please, Archer.” The whimpering plea came from a throat no longer her own. Archer was as powerless to deny her as he was himself. They joined in a fiery union.

  Meredith knew his primitive, thrusting rhythm as her own and answered it in kind. They moved together, seeking both release and elevation in union. Meredith felt the pitch of her need rise higher and higher until she was perched on a lonely peak far above any she had known before. And still she kept ascending. Higher and higher until Archer’s labored breathing in her ear was a shrill, keening wind that finally blew her from her perch into a kaleidoscopic explosion of fulfillment. For several lost moments of precious oblivion, they lay tangled in one another’s arms. Meredith felt the mad pumping of Archer’s heart gradually settle back into a slower rhythm.

  He slumped onto the bed and drew Meredith to him so that they rested together like spoons in a drawer. He carefully adjusted the sheet around her shoulders.

  For the moment, a moment she knew could never last, Meredith felt utterly safe and utterly loved. She pulled Archer’s arms closer around her, shut her eyes, and luxuriated in the feeling. She pressed Archer’s palm to her lips and covered it with kisses that spoke of the happiness he’d brought her.

  They lay in a bliss-filled silence that went on so long, Meredith was sure Archer had fallen quietly asleep and she snuggled up closer to him. She herself was almost asleep when he spoke. His words revealed that his mind had been far from inactive.

  “My beautiful, exasperating enigma,” Archer sighed, kissing the dampened tendrils curling against the nape of her neck. “What could you possibly be hiding from me?” His hands slipped from her grasp and he ran a finger teasingly along the underslope of her breast. “Perhaps the tiny scar from a breast augmentation?”

  Brimming with contentment, Meredith laughed at the outlandish suggestion.

  “Of course not,” he whispered, his hand sliding upward to capture the straining fullness of her breast. Meredith stilled the gasp of pleasure that threatened to break from her lips. “Nothing that feels this exquisite could be man-made.”

  Meredith could no longer answer with a laughing lightness as his thumb and forefinger closed over her beaded nipple. Suddenly, it was as if the all-pervading satisfaction of only a moment before had never existed. With an excruciating sweetness, Archer continued his exploratory journey. His fingers now traced a tingling line along the base of her belly.

  “Perhaps a botched appendectomy?” he playfully guessed, pretending to feel for a scar. “These fingertips have eyes, you know,” he joked, tickling her with the ends of his f
ingers. The tickling slowed, then turned into caresses that lingered over Meredith’s breasts, along the inward slope of her waist, over the fluffy triangle at the juncture between her legs. “And all they can see is unending loveliness. Unending loveliness.”

  The words trailed away, lost in the quickening tempo of Archer’s breath. His grip on Meredith tightened, but his touch remained light as it tantalized the smoldering flesh along her thighs. He traced a path of tingling sensation up their inner sides. A paralyzing languor swept over Meredith as he expertly homed in on the magic center of all her desire. Her quickening response to his touch spurred Archer to a thundering renewal of desire. His mouth sought out the satiny feel of her skin, feathering her with kisses that tantalized her breasts, then slipped down lower. As his head disappeared beneath the covers, Meredith emerged from the drugged stupor she’d fallen into and realized what Archer was intending. She stiffened and rolled away from his descending mouth.

  An expression of pain was darkening his crystalline eyes when they reappeared. Before he could pry into the secrets she was frantically trying to keep hidden from him, she silenced his question with a kiss that arced a bow of fire between them. Then, before he could gather himself to began probing again, her own mouth was sliding over his sea-tasting skin on an inexorable journey downward. When it reached its destination, all questions, all conscious thoughts, were banished in a whirlwind of sweetly spiraling desire.

  Archer groaned as her lips, her tongue, her mouth found him. Meredith marveled at the extent of her power over this twentieth-century Viking as he writhed from the impact of the waves of pleasure bludgeoning him into a state of senseless seeking. He groped for her beneath the covers, pulling her up to him. His taste on her lips was maddening. It was a lunacy that Meredith shared. She parted her legs and was filled by the surging length of his maleness.

  Archer pulled her to him so that in the deepest reaches of her most private self, she knew again that they were one. They were still for several long moments, simply experiencing the wonder of their union. Then, swaying to rhythms older than memory, Meredith rocked slowly, experimenting with movements she had never before dared. Pulling the covers around her like a cloak, she sat up and new thrills shivered through her, emanating from the deepest source possible. With Archer’s hands guiding her, they found a rhythm that was uniquely theirs. Meredith knew that neither she, nor Archer, nor any other two people who had ever loved one another before, had moved precisely as they moved together.

  The movement and rhythm had a life of their own that captured her and took her sailing off to an exotic place of wild, careening fulfillment. As she floated gently down from the shattering ecstasy, Meredith had the same sense of wingless flight she’d had in Archer’s balloon. It was a sensation that only birds and angels had any right to, and now she knew it too. That was her last thought before she drifted into a fathomless sleep.

  Chapter 7

  As broad stripes of daffodil-colored sunlight crept across Archer’s room, Meredith drifted lazily into the cozy limbo stage halfway between waking and dreaming. She was awake enough to be aware of a sense of handspringing joy percolating through her. She wasn’t awake enough, though, to identify its source. For a few groggy moments she was back in the bedroom she’d grown up in in Chicago and it was the first day of summer. That was the last time she’d known such untrammeled exuberance. She lurched at the sound of Archer’s phone ringing on the bedside table. It caused her to remember that Archer had slipped out of bed early to let her sleep in peace.

  Archer returned and rushed to grab his phone. He was trying to keep his voice low so as not to wake her, but Meredith welcomed the sound of the deep, male tones. They satisfied some elemental longing within her that had been too long denied. She slowly opened her eyes. Archer’s back was turned to her. She reveled in the sight. His years of hard labor and continuing physical upkeep showed in the densely mounded muscles of his broad shoulders that tapered away to his waist. Two indentations like giant thumbprints pressed in just above the rise of each hard buttock.

  “Okay, Phil, I’ll meet you out there. Have her ready to launch, okay? Appreciate it, buddy.” Archer ended the phone conversation and leaned forward to replace the receiver. His back was transformed into an anatomy lesson as the bony ridge of his spine and the curving spokes of his rib cage jumped into relief. Meredith marveled at the splendid mechanisms that drove Archer’s magnificent body. If only, she thought with a bitterness that was never far from her reflections, I had such bodily splendors to display.

  “Sorry,” he said, “I didn’t expect any early morning callers.”

  “I should have been up hours ago,” Meredith muttered, pulling the sheet more tightly around her as she searched the room for her clothes. A flutter of panic disturbed her tranquillity as Archer turned to her.

  “Did you sleep well?” His marvelous voice caressed the simple words as he moved under the sheet, pulling her to him.

  “Better than well,” Meredith answered nervously. There was too much light. She was too exposed. “Weller, wellest? I slept wellest.”

  “Wellest, indeed,” Archer chuckled, his hands outlining the tightening muscles of Meredith’s stomach. “You know what you look like when you’re asleep?”

  “You were watching me?”

  “For quite a long time until I went into the other room. You look like a Botticelli angel.”

  Sliding away from his teasing fingers, Meredith asked, “And how does an oil field worker know about Botticelli?”

  “I managed to cram a lot in during my off hours,” he joked. “And don’t change the subject. We were talking about you. And since we are, just where do you think you’re going?”

  With a growl of mock ferocity, Archer pounced on Meredith, playfully nuzzling her neck and capturing her in his arms. As always, his embrace sent the mental hobgoblins that plagued Meredith running for their hiding places. With her back to him, Archer drew her to him and they were joined in a way Meredith had never experienced before. Archer uncovered the bud of her most intimate self and, with infinite tenderness and skill, brought it to a shuddering flowering before he found his own quakingly powerful release.

  “Meredith.” Her name came in love-exhausted bursts. “There is something happening with us. You know that, don’t you?”

  His question was freighted with a cargo of deep implications. Meredith hesitated before she answered that she too felt it.

  “I’m afraid to say anything more,” Archer continued. “It’s so new. So different from anything I’ve felt before. It seems so powerful, but also so fragile. I don’t want the wrong words to shatter it. Do you know what I mean?”

  Meredith pivoted in his arms to face him. “Yes, I know what you mean. I’m scared too. It’s new for me as well. I’m afraid that . . .” She ached to let it all spill out. To tell him her fear that when he learned who she really was, it would all end. But it wasn’t just a fear in Meredith’s mind. It was a certainty.

  She was not strong enough to bear the rejection she would surely see curdling his handsome face, muddying his vibrant eyes after she made her confession and he knew of her self-imposed illness, an illness that would reveal to him once and for all how confused she really was. For she still was that person. That was the last thing her therapist had told her. Anorexia never goes completely away. Just as the reformed alcoholic carries a propensity to abuse liquor with him to the grave, so too with her. She would always be an anorectic. She couldn’t tell him. Not yet. She wanted too badly for what they had to go on, if only for a few more days, a few more hours. That would be enough. It would have to be enough.

  “Afraid that what?” Archer prompted gently.

  “Afraid that if we don’t get moving, Phil is going to get very lonely at the launch site.” Her joke was an evasion and Archer saw it as such.

  “You may not believe this.” All the softness had gone from Archer’s voice and it was edged with a lancing menace. “But I am not usually an open person. Esp
ecially where my feelings are concerned. It took an effort for me to expose myself as I have to you. Don’t you think it’s about time you reciprocated?”

  The question was a hairsbreadth away from an angry demand. It chilled Meredith. She cursed herself and her dilemma but could not speak. Her words were frozen along with the lump of fear that choked her. She listened to his breathing in the silence. It grew louder and louder until, with a snort of disgust, Archer threw aside the bedcovers and got up. He stalked over to a walk-in closet and whipped a pair of charcoal gray corduroy slacks off a hanger and stepped into them. Next he ripped a Prussian blue challis shirt off a hanger and put that on. The colors highlighted his brooding Nordic blondness.

  Steadying himself and fighting back his fit of temper with a deep breath, Archer held up a bundle of clothes and suggested evenly, “Listen, I have no idea how close these’ll come to fitting. I have a nephew who visits in the summer and he left these here. I think you’re about the same size. If they fit and if you’re so inclined, come on out to the airfield with me. We’re going to be launching the solar balloon. Might be good material for your story.”

  Meredith bolted upright in bed. “The solar balloon? Really?” she babbled.

  The brooding darkness left Archer’s face at the sight of her childlike enthusiasm. “I thought that might perk up the eager cub reporter.” He tossed the jeans, T-shirt, and tennis shoes onto the bed. “Suit up and I’ll fix us some breakfast.”

  When Meredith didn’t move from beneath the shelter of the bedcovers, Archer’s happiness crumbled again. “I see, the visual embargo is still in force. Would you feel better if I left the room? The county? The state? What in God’s name do you think you have to hide from me, woman?” he stormed. “We’ve already shared the most private act two humans can share. Doesn’t that mean anything?” He stared at Meredith, desperate for an answer, an explanation. When none came, he withdrew from the bedroom, slamming the door behind him.